Topic: top-down signals

Pyramidal neurons have apical dendrites that are both physically and electrically segregated from their cell bodies. In sensory cortex, these apical dendrites receive primarily top-down signals from associative and motor regions, while the cell bodies and nearby dendrites of these same pyramidal neurons are mostly targeted by bottom-up or locally recurrent inputs from the sensory periphery. Due to these differences, a number of theories in computational neuroscience postulate a unique role for apical dendrites in shaping sensory processing and plasticity in the face of new or surprising stimul

Vision provides us with a holistic interpretation of the world that is, with very few exceptions, coherent and consistent across multiple levels of abstraction, from scene to objects to features. In this talk I will present results from past and ongoing work in my laboratory that investigates the role top-down signals play in establishing such coherent perceptual experience. Based on the results of several psychophysical experiments I will introduce a theory of “self-consistent inference” and show how it can account for human perceptual behavior. The talk will close with a discussion of how th